Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@justincbagley
Last active April 28, 2024 22:28
Show Gist options
  • Save justincbagley/ec0a6334cc86e854715e459349ab1446 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save justincbagley/ec0a6334cc86e854715e459349ab1446 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
How To Convert Markdown to PDF

How to convert markdown to PDF:

This post reviews several methods for converting a Markdown (.md) formatted file to PDF, from UNIX or Linux machines.

Using Pandoc:

$ pandoc How_I_got_svg-resizer_working_on_Mac_OSX.md -s -o test1.pdf

Other methods:

GRIP

http://superuser.com/questions/689056/how-can-i-convert-github-flavored-markdown-to-a-pdf I've had success using grip to display markdown in Chrome and then use Chrome's "Save as PDF" option in the Print dialog.

pip install grip  
grip your_markdown.md

grip will render the markdown on localhost:5000 ... - just edit away and refresh the browser. Print when ready.

This gave a more reliable representation than pandoc and was lighter weight than installing LaTeX (required by pandoc for pdf generation).

The print is not command line in this answer, but still found this easier/more reliable (looked 100% like Github for a long document including relatively linked images and code highlighting).

Node.js

http://superuser.com/questions/689056/how-can-i-convert-github-flavored-markdown-to-a-pdf You can also use Node.js based markdown-pdf

npm install -g markdown-pdf
markdown-pdf /path/to/markdown

NOTES:

The GRIP results look just like GitHub README pages. The Pandoc result looks like (is) LaTex format. And the Node.js result is the most original looking, but slightly harder to read than GRIP output PDF. Overall, I prefer GRIP output.

@PitGartmann
Copy link

PitGartmann commented Mar 20, 2024

Did you have any issues with the VsCode Extension Markdown PDF when using a GitHub remote Repository? I was using GitLab before that which worked perfectly, but now that I changed to GitHub it doesnt seem to work anymore. Im not getting specific errors, but only the message that the file destination cannot be found.

Managed to fix the Problem myself. It was due to one of my files not having the .md ending.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment